Premises

In the wake of last week’s events, Sarah heads out on a self-destructive bender, Cosima breaks down, Felix supplies some essential services and some possibly-false information, and the police arrest Donnie for drug trafficking.

Evie is truly evil, and something may be amiss with Rachel’s artificial eye.

High Points

This week’s episode featured brilliant writing, directing, acting, and editing. The cross-cutting of incongruous scenes—the nightclub, the kid’s party, and two secret lairs—is brilliant, especially as we see the parallels. I felt like I had shoved my head into several distinct kinds of crazy, and found meaning anyway.

Low Points

Okay. I lied.

I said I would just accept the notion that the main setting is a generic North American city, and not Toronto, and stop talking about it.

But if you want to do that in a show, do not have your central character party at the Bovine Sex Club before having a long, dark night of the soul in front of the CN Tower, above a railway track with a passing GO Train. All Sarah needed to do to complete the picture was go to a Blue Jays game and then get stuck in traffic on the Gardiner.

Also—does anyone else find it difficult to believe that Cosima and Scott would not have a separate back-up of their research?

The Scores:

Originality: 4/6

Effects: 5/6

Story: 5/6 The intercut stories play brilliantly off each other. Only the Art Bell/Marty Duko storyline felt misplaced in this particular episode.

Acting: 6/6 Jordan Gavaris can be hilarious; this week, he’s called upon to remind us he’s playing a convincing human being,

Do I even need to mention Maslaney again? The episode demands much; she delivers.

7 Comments

lostMay 27, 2016 @ 11:25 am

You would think that they would have a separate backup, wouldn’t you? However, after years in the tech industry, I can honestly say that it is not particularly unbelievable that they wouldn’t. It takes ongoing effort to make and keep up to date an air-gapped backup that wouldn’t be vulnerable to the typical magic malware attack. Given that crap that’s going on, it’s not unreasonable that it would get forgotten. Any other backup (online storage of any kind, extra hard drives in the machine, etc.) which is not completely offline except when it’s being updated could easily be destroyed by the same magic malware attack. So, yeah, it’s a definite oversight that they don’t have another backup somewhere. Howver, it’s not nearly as unbelieveable as it might seem on the surface.

I’m half expecting MK to come along with a copy of the research at some point, actually. It seems like the sort of thing she would do.

Yeah, it’s an interesting one. I’ve seen too many instances IRL where people’s backups failed, but they did seem to be caught completely on the hop and not actually even have a secure backup available in the first place – which is obviously pretty lousy practice for someone in their situation. Certainly not unheard of, but still… I don’t doubt they are going to somehow recover from this, and the MK twist is an interesting one, but smacks a bit too much of Deus ex Machina – as we’ve not really had any kind of loaded gun that she might have one.

Personally, I’d like to see Scott pull something out of the science bag and save the day. That *was* hinted at in the episode and he was pretty much dumped on by Cosima too, so the stage is certainly set for him to prove himself as equally competent a lab partner as Delphine.